CBProf: Customisable Blockchain-as-a-Service Performance Profiler in Cloud Environments

Blockchain technologies, e.g., Hyperledger Fabric and Sawtooth, have been evolving rapidly during past years and enable potential decentralised innovations in a substantial amount of business applications, e.g. crowd journalism, car-sharing and energy trading. The development of decentralised business applications has to face challenges in selecting suitable blockchain technologies, customising network protocols among distributed peers, and optimising system performance to meet application requirements. Also, manually testing and comparing those different technologies are time-consuming. Therefore, an effective tool is needed for profiling the performance characteristics of blockchain services in different cloud environments. In this paper, we present the Customisable Blockchain-as-a-Service Performance Profiler (CBProf), a tool we developed for automating blockchain deployment and performance profiling in cloud environments. We also provide the implementation and functionality demonstration of this tool

Algorithm 950: Ncpol2sdpa---Sparse Semidefinite Programming Relaxations for Polynomial Optimization Problems of Noncommuting Variables

A hierarchy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations approximates the global optimum of polynomial optimization problems of noncommuting variables. Generating the relaxation, however, is a computationally demanding task, and only problems of commuting variables have efficient generators. We develop an implementation for problems of noncommuting problems that creates the relaxation to be solved by SDPA -- a high-performance solver that runs in a distributed environment. We further exploit the inherent sparsity of optimization problems in quantum physics to reduce the complexity of the resulting relaxations. Constrained problems with a relaxation of order two may contain up to a hundred variables. The implementation is available in Python. The tool helps solve problems such as finding the ground state energy or testing quantum correlations.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, 2 algorithms, the algorithm is available at http://peterwittek.github.io/ncpol2sdpa

Aerodynamic Performance and Acoustic Measurements of a High-Lift Propeller in an Isolated Configuration

A series of aerodynamic performance and acoustic measurements has been made on a high-lift propeller intended for utilization on a distributed electric propulsion (DEP) aircraft. Tests were performed in the NASA Langley Low Speed Aeroacoustic Wind Tunnel (LSAWT), which has recently undergone a capability enhancement for the testing of small propellers/rotors and small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) platforms. The objectives of this testing campaign are two-fold: first to demonstrate the facility capabilities for performing small propeller aeroacoustic testing, and second to compare experimental measurements with computational fluid dynamic (CFD) predictions and CFD-based acoustic predictions of the tested propeller configurations for tool development and validation purposes

Automated System Performance Testing at MongoDB

Distributed Systems Infrastructure (DSI) is MongoDB's framework for running fully automated system performance tests in our Continuous Integration (CI) environment. To run in CI it needs to automate everything end-to-end: provisioning and deploying multi-node clusters, executing tests, tuning the system for repeatable results, and collecting and analyzing the results. Today DSI is MongoDB's most used and most useful performance testing tool. It runs almost 200 different benchmarks in daily CI, and we also use it for manual performance investigations. As we can alert the responsible engineer in a timely fashion, all but one of the major regressions were fixed before the 4.2.0 release. We are also able to catch net new improvements, of which DSI caught 17. We open sourced DSI in March 2020.Comment: Author Preprint. Appearing in DBTest.io 202

Audition: a DevOps-oriented service optimization and testing framework for cloud environments

This paper demonstrates an approach to automated testing and quality assurance in cloud environments, which also takes deployment cost into consideration. With a distributed service architecture and some given performance goals, the end result will be a suggestion of the optimal resource type and filesystem with the lowest price point for each function of the architecture. Our solution is modeled after the auditioning process in the theater industry, which provides a process that fits well into our context and is easy to understand and follow. The resulting tool, Audition, is a working implementation of our model and is extendable in several ways, allowing for integration with local technologies

Development of a Photovoltaic Array Emulator in a Real Time Control Environment Using xPC Target

Part 12: Integration of Power Electronics Systems with ICT - IIInternational audienceThis paper is devoted to the design and construction of a photovoltaic array emulator for high power applications in order to test all kind of photovoltaic inverters. To develop such device, a rapid prototyping tool based on xPC Target of Matlab/Simulink has been used, providing a real-time testing environment. PV array emulator can be used to evaluate the performance of photovoltaic inverters as any test conditions can be programmed. The proposed emulator operates as a distributed control system taking advantage of the TCP/IP protocol features

CamSim:a distributed smart camera network simulator

Smart cameras allow pre-processing of video data on the camera instead of sending it to a remote server for further analysis. Having a network of smart cameras allows various vision tasks to be processed in a distributed fashion. While cameras may have different tasks, we concentrate on distributed tracking in smart camera networks. This application introduces various highly interesting problems. Firstly, how can conflicting goals be satisfied such as cameras in the network try to track objects while also trying to keep communication overhead low? Secondly, how can cameras in the network self adapt in response to the behavior of objects and changes in scenarios, to ensure continued efficient performance? Thirdly, how can cameras organise themselves to improve the overall network's performance and efficiency? This paper presents a simulation environment, called CamSim, allowing distributed self-adaptation and self-organisation algorithms to be tested, without setting up a physical smart camera network. The simulation tool is written in Java and hence allows high portability between different operating systems. Relaxing various problems of computer vision and network communication enables a focus on implementing and testing new self-adaptation and self-organisation algorithms for cameras to use

Automated Regression Testing within Video Game Development

Automated testing reduces the costs of softwaredevelopment. We propose a testing model that is specificallydesigned for the creation and execution of fully automatedregression tests within video game development without the needof test isolation. The proposed model combines the usability andveracity of record and playback techniques and the possible testcoverage of tests written in a game specific scripting language.The model has an intuitive structure that enables professionalvideo game testers to create meaningful tests by using only arudimentary set of programming skills within a graphical userinterface. The resulting tool establishes a network connectionwith one or several concurrently running applications under testwhile the required performance can be distributed betweenseveral dedicated computers. The application under test ismodified to process incoming function calls and to generateoutput that is used to dynamically control the course of the testsand to evaluate if the tested application operates withinacceptable parameters

Incm & Nova Sbe Pbl project - retirement law query system: performance analysis & evaluation of bert for extractive question-answering of portuguese retirement law

This study presents a performance evaluation of the model BERT for an Extractive Question Answering task applied to the domain of Portuguese Retirement Law. By using multiple standard metrics in information retrieval solutions, the study measures how the Portuguese BERT performs as a semantic search solution on Portuguese Retirement Law by comparing its answers with a testing set composed of 180 questions and answers provided by INCM. The study revealed that the solution showed positive results. A form was also distributed to INCM, which indicated positive feedback when comparing it with the current solution implemented. This project showed that the Portuguese BERT is a very promising tool that can be used for Extractive Question Answering and for semantic search on various other domains